Historicizing digital journalism in Africa: Actors, processes and proliferation

Digital journalism has become the inevitable material and symbolic foundation of contemporary journalism practices. The speed and scale of its adoption are extraordinary, and the processes of digital journalism have given birth to a plethora of actors in the news production cycle. In Africa, the adoption and appropriation of digital journalism materialized-and continue to evolve-within historical moments specific to the continent. It has also taken place within countries in which locales of the 'first' and 'third' worlds (the latter characterized by precarious and contingent infrastructure) exist uneasily alongside one another, with citizens traversing both worlds as need arises. In recent years, the debates around digital journalism practices in newsrooms have grown in salience in the context of large-scale adoption of the practice. Using secondary literature, our chapter seeks to map the ways in which African journalism appropriated digital practices at different historical moments and how contextual factors shaped both the disruptions and continuities attendant to digital journalism. We seek to answer the question: what factors have influenced and shaped the adoption and proliferation of digital journalism on the African continent? Our chapter makes a contribution to ongoing global debates on the historicization of digital journalism by making an addition from an African perspective.